Extreme Denial (6 page)

“Before you got here, Renata showed herself to me. She told me the best way to hurt me is to let me live.”

“What?”

“So I can suffer for the rest of my life, knowing I killed my father.”

“But your shot didn’t kill him! He isn’t dead!”

“He might as well be.
Renata will never let us take him out of here. She hates me too much.” Brian pulled his revolver from his pocket. In the gloom, it seemed that he pointed it at himself.

“Brian! No!”

But instead of shooting himself, Brian surged to his feet, cursed, and disappeared into the darkness at the back of the courtyard.

Amid the pelting rain, Decker—shocked—heard Brian’s footsteps charging up an exterior wooden staircase.

“Brian, I warned you!” a woman shouted from above. The husky voice was Renata’s. “Don’t come after me!”

Brian’s footsteps charged higher.

Lights came on in balcony windows.

“I gave you a chance!” Renata shouted. “Stay away, or I’ll do what I did at the other apartment buildings!”

“You’re going to pay for making a fool of me!”

Renata laughed. “You did it to yourself!”

“You’re going to pay for my father!”

“You did
that
yourself!”

Brian’s footsteps pounded higher.

“Don’t be an idiot!” Renata shouted. “The explosives have been set! I’ll press the detonator!”

Brian’s urgent footsteps kept pounding on the stairs.

Their rumble was overwhelmed by thunder, not from the storm but from an explosion whose blinding flash erupted out of an apartment on the fourth balcony at the back. The ear-stunning roar knocked Decker backward. As wreckage cascaded, the ferocity of the flames illuminated the courtyard.

A movement to Decker’s left made him turn. A thin, darkhaired man in his early twenties, one of the brothers whom Decker had met at the café the night before, rose from behind garbage cans.

Decker stiffened. They must be all around me, but in the dark, I didn’t know it!

The young man hadn’t been prepared for Renata to detonate the bomb. Although he had a pistol, his attention was totally distracted by a scream on the other side of the courtyard. With wide-eyed dismay, the young man saw one of his brothers swatting at flames on his clothes and in his hair, which had been ignited by the falling, burning wreckage. The rain didn’t seem to affect the flames. The second brother kept screaming.

Decker shot twice at the first brother, hitting his chest and head. As the gunman toppled, Decker pivoted and shot twice at the man in flames, dropping him, also. The gunshots were almost obscured by the crackle and roar of the fire as it spread from the fourth balcony.

More wreckage fell. Crouching behind the crate, Decker scanned the area in search of more targets. Brian.
Where was Brian?
Decker’s peripheral vision detected motion in the far left corner of the courtyard, near the door that he and Brian had come through.

But the movement wasn’t Brian. The tall, slim, sensuous figure that emerged from the shadows of another stairway was Renata. Holding a pistol equipped with a sound suppressor, she shot repeatedly toward the courtyard, all the while running toward the open doorway. The muffled shots, normally no louder than a fist against a pillow, were totally silent because of the roaring chaos of the blaze.

Behind the crate, Decker sprawled on the wet cobblestones and squirmed forward on his elbows and knees. He reached the side of the crate, caught a glimpse of Renata nearing the exit, aimed through the rain, and shot twice more. His first bullet struck the wall behind her. His second hit her in the throat. She clutched her windpipe, blood spewing. Her throat would squeeze shut. Death from asphyxiation would occur in less than three minutes.

Despite the din of the flames, Decker heard a scream of anguish. One of Renata’s brothers showed himself, racing from the open stairway, shooting toward the courtyard, grabbing Renata where she had fallen, dragging her closer to the open doorway. At once he shot again, but not at Decker, instead toward the stairwell at the back of the courtyard, as if protecting himself from bullets that came from that direction. As Decker aimed, the last brother appeared, shot repeatedly in Decker’s direction, and helped to get his sister into the street and out of view. Decker emptied his pistol, hastily ejected its magazine, and inserted a full one. By then, the terrorists were gone.

Sweat mixed with rain on his face. He shuddered, spun in case there were other targets, and saw Brian jump down the last few steps of the open stairway at the back of the courtyard.

Brian clutched his revolver, his hand shaking.

“We have to get out of here!” Decker yelled.

No more than a minute had passed since the explosion. People wearing pajamas and sometimes less were charging onto the balconies and down outdoor stairways to get away from the fire.

Decker avoided a chunk of flaming wreckage and rushed to Brian, who had an arm around his father, lifting him.

“I can feel him breathe!” Brian said.

“Give me his legs.”

Decker heard people rushing in panic down the stairs as he and Brian carried McKittrick across the courtyard toward the open doorway.

“Wait,” Decker said. He set down McKittrick’s legs and aimed cautiously out toward the street. He saw a car speed away from the curb, its red taillights becoming rapidly smaller, the vehicle skidding through puddles, around a corner, disappearing.

Decker was far enough from the roaring flames to hear the pulsing wail of approaching sirens. One of the terrorists might have stayed, hiding behind a car, hoping to create an ambush. But Decker was betting that the sirens were as worrisome to the terrorists as they were to him.

He decided to take the chance. “Let’s go!” he told Brian.

As people crowded behind them, he and Brian hurried to carry McKittrick toward the Fiat and set him in the backseat. Brian stayed in back with his father while Decker slid behind the steering wheel and sped away, narrowly missing people in the street. At the same time, numerous sirens wailed louder behind the Fiat Pressing his foot on the accelerator, Decker glanced nervously at the rearview mirror and saw the flashing lights of emergency vehicles appear on the rainy street behind him.

But what about up ahead? he wondered, his hands tense on the steering wheel. The street was so narrow that if fire trucks or police cars sped around a corner, heading in Decker’s direction, there’d be no way around them. The Fiat would be trapped.

A rain-slick corner loomed. Decker swerved, finding himself on a street that was wider. No approaching lights flashed in the darkness ahead. The sirens were farther behind him.

“I think we got away,” Decker said. “How’s your father?”

“He’s still alive. That’s the best I can say.”

Decker tried to breathe less quickly. “What did Renata mean about threatening to do what she did at the other apartment buildings?”

“She told me she rigged explosives at some of them. After I showed up, looking for her and the others ...” Brian had trouble speaking.

“As soon as you were out of the area, she set off the charges?”

“Yes.”

“You’d made such a commotion, barging into the apartments, that the other people in the building would have come out to learn what was going on? They’d associate you with the explosions?”

“Yes.”

“Renata wanted an American to be blamed?”

“Yes,”

“Damn it, you let her use you again,” Decker said.

“But I got even.”

“Even?”

“You saw what I did. I shot her.”

“
You
...
?”
Decker couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He felt as if the road wavered.
“You
didn’t shoot her.”

“In the throat,” Brian said.

“No.”

“You’re trying to claim
you
did?” Brian demanded.

My God, he truly is crazy, Decker thought. “There’s nothing to brag about here, Brian. If you
had
shot her, it wouldn’t make me think less of myself or more of you. If anything, I’d feel sorry for you. It’s a terrible thing, living with the memory of ...”

“Sorry for me?
What the hell are you talking about? You think you’re better than I am? What gives you the right to feel so superior?”

“Forget it, Brian.”

“Sorry for me? Are you trying to claim
you
did what
I
did?”

“Just calm down,” Decker said.

“You hate me so much, the next thing, you’ll be claiming
I
was the one who shot my father.”

Decker’s sense of reality was so threatened that he felt momentarily dizzy. “Whatever you say, Brian. All I want to do is get him to a hospital.”

“Damned right.”

Decker heard a pulsing siren. The flashing lights of a police car raced toward him. His palms sweated on the steering wheel. At once the police car rushed past, heading in the direction from which Decker had come.

“Give me your revolver, Brian.”

“Get serious.”

“I mean it. Hand me your revolver.”

“You’ve got to be—”

“Just once, for Christ sake, listen to me. There’ll be other police cars. Someone will tell the police a Fiat sped away. There’s a chance we’ll be stopped. It’s bad enough we have a wounded man in the car. But if the police find our handguns ...”

“What are you going to do with my revolver? You think you can use ballistics from it to prove I shot my father? You’re afraid I’ll try to get rid of it?”

“No,
I’m
going to get rid of it.”

Brian cocked his head in surprise.

“As much as I don’t want to.” Decker stopped at the side of the murky street and turned to stare at Brian. “Give ... me ... your ... revolver.”

Squinting, Brian studied him. Slowly he reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out the weapon.

Decker pulled out his own weapon.

Only when Brian offered the revolver, butt first, did Decker allow himself to relax a little. In the courtyard, before he had helped to lift McKittrick’s father, he had picked up the elderly man’s pistol. Now he took that pistol, his own, and Brian’s. He got out of the Fiat into the chilling rain, scanned the darkness to see if anyone was watching, went around to the curb, knelt as if to check the pressure on one of his tires, and inconspicuously dropped the three handguns down a sewer drain.

Immediately he got back into the Fiat and drove away.

“So that takes care of that, huh?” Brian said.

“Yes,” Decker answered bitterly. “That takes care of that”

16

“He has lost a great deal of blood,” the emergency-room doctor said in Italian. “His pulse is weak and erratic. His blood pressure is low. I do not wish to be pessimistic, but I am afraid that you must prepare yourself for any eventuality.”

“I understand,” Decker said. “This man’s son and I appreciate anything you can do for him.”

The doctor nodded gravely and went back into the emergency room.

Decker turned to two weary-looking hospital officials who stood respectfully in a corner of the waiting room. “I’m grateful for your cooperation in this matter,” Decker told them. “My superiors will be even more grateful. Of course, a suitable gesture of gratitude will be made to everyone involved.”

“Your superiors have always been most generous.” One of the officials took off his spectacles. “We will do our best to make certain that the authorities are not informed about the true cause of the patient’s injury.”

“I have total confidence in your discretion.” Decker shook hands with them. The money he slipped into their palms disappeared into their pockets. “
Grazie
.”

As soon as the officials left, Decker sat beside Brian. “Good. You kept your mouth shut.”

“We have an understanding with this hospital?”

Decker nodded.

“Is this place first-rate?” Brian asked. “It seems awfully small.”

“It’s the best.”

“We’ll see.”

“Prayer wouldn’t hurt.”

Brian frowned. “You mean you’re religious?”

“I like to keep my options open.” Decker peered down at his wet clothes, which were clinging to him. “What they’re doing for your father is going to take a while. I think we’d better go back to your hotel and put on dry clothes.”

“But what if something happens while we’re gone?”

“You mean if he dies?” Decker asked.

“Yes.”

“It won’t make any difference whether we’re in this room or not.”

“This is all your fault.”

“What?” Decker felt sudden pressure behind his ears.
“My
fault?”

“You got us into this mess. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened.”

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“If you hadn’t shown up on Friday and rushed me, I could have handled Renata and her group just fine.”

“Why don’t we talk about this on the way to your hotel?”

17

“He claims that as soon as you got him out of the hospital, you shoved him into an alley and beat him up,” Decker’s superior said.

“He can claim anything he wants.” It was Monday. Again, Decker was in an office at the international real estate consulting firm, but this time, he was speaking to his superior in person rather than on a scrambler-protected telephone.

The gray-haired superior, whose sagging cheeks were florid from tension, leaned forward across the table. “You deny the accusation?”

“Brian was injured in the incident at the apartment building. I have no idea where this fantasy about my beating him comes from.”

“He says you’re jealous of him.”

“Right.”

“That you’re angry because he found the terrorists.”

“Sure.”

“That you’re trying to get even with him by claiming that he accidentally shot his father.”

“Imagine.”

“And that you’re trying to take credit for shooting the terrorists whom
he
in fact shot.”

“Look,” Decker said, “I know you need to protect your pension. I know there’s a lot of political pressure and that you need to cover your ass. But why are you dignifying that jerk’s ridiculous accusations by repeating them to me?”